Joshua Oppenheimer: ‘The End is an artefact of barbarism’

Signalling his first foray into fiction film, Joshua Oppenheimer discusses the moral transference of documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence into the vibrant, lyrical dystopia of The End – with a claustrophobic family portrait that is far from a vision of harmony.

LWLies: In your previous documentary films, you challenge accepted histories with subjective experience. To what extent does The End draw from these conclusions?

Oppenheimer: I think that all three films are meditations on storytelling, on how we create our reality, and know ourselves through the stories we tell…. Namely, the uniquely human ability to lie to ourselves, even if we know that we’re lying. Which is an astonishing feat really, and I think the tragic flaw that will lead to our downfall.

The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence both emphasize a kind of continuity with an apocalypse. A genocide takes place, and we are left with the lies and fantasies imposed by the perpetrators. And I think The End is demanding an intervention rooted in self-reflection and honesty. Apocalypse is not just the end of the world, it’s equally a distillation of our destructive behaviour in the present because we’re already after the end – we’re already living in the bunker. And what is that bunker really about? It’s about lies, and stories, and self-deception rooted in shame, or an inability to face the truth. We give ourselves permission to fill a hole – we place ourselves; we re-inscribe, we re-enforce the walls.

Mirrors are a huge part of the film. And especially in Tilda Swinton’s solo performance, where she’s speaking directly to her reflection.

Mirrors are a motif also in The Act of Killing – I’m always interested in mirrors as a place where we ought to see ourselves and don’t. Tilda’s song is titled ‘The Mirror’, and she’s distinctly not seeing what’s in the mirror. She doesn’t see herself; she starts by seeing a stranger, and makes up excuses which fall apart one-by-one under their own weight. The mirror reminds us of the recognition that is demanded by the situation, but that the character’s unable to achieve. It speaks to how I think of my filmmaking as a whole – as a mirror, not a window onto a reality, or a story that is interesting, but an invitation to look at ourselves.

Something I love about the film is the costumes – design is so important to each character specifically.

Costumes are the only thing between you and your naked reflection…. these characters are constantly performing for each other and for themselves. There was a really exciting discussion with Tilda who was able to gain us access to Chanel’s whole archive of costumes and clothes. And with Frauke Firl, the costume designer. Father has a kind of studied casualness with these knit sweaters, tweeds – a kind of Jimmy Stewart quality, with a roiling self-hatred underneath. Mother has tight necks, as if the clothes which she puts on are almost strangling herself, and cuts her hair in the same way as Son, as a ritual they do together.

Colour isn’t simply a visually beautiful part of the film, it functions effectively as its own character.

Colour was a keyway of making this place seductive. Both the colour and the paintings on the wall, cathect a lot of hope and desire. We knew the bunker shouldn’t be a claustrophobic affair, like Hitler’s in Downfall, it should be a whole world. We had skylights which simulated daylight, changing the colour temperature of the space. But if the light and the music are telling you the same thing, you have the repetition that is at the core of sentimentality. I loathe sentimentality – I think it’s always escapist, and always part of self-deception.

The whole film is constructed around this idea of bourgeois art, and has a luxurious control. Do you think affluence inherently carries with it moral questioning?

I think that affluence is rooted in fetishization. We chose American luminist paintings, to serve as windows onto a lost nature that never really existed. But the key to American luminism is that you don’t see the brushstrokes. That obscures not just the labour of making and imagining them, but also the labour in the destruction of the earth.

The paintings of people hanging on the wall upstage them at times, staring at us like witnesses from a time where there was still meaning, inditing us. This is the last human family, the characters are nameless because they are each and every one of us. And those artworks, like any fetish of affluence, as Walter Benjamin says, “always an artefact of barbarism.” And so is our film – The End is also an artefact of barbarism.